Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music

On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music

Crangle, Sara
Nicholls, Peter

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction

ISBN10: 1441155201
ISBN13: 9781441155207
Publisher: Continnuum-3PL
Published: Apr 26 2012
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

While the sublime has garnered a great deal of critical attention over the past twenty years, its counterpart, bathos, has yet to receive any extended treatment. Generally understood as an inadvertent descent to the low, vulgar, and ludicrous in writing or art, the term bathos was popularised by Pope, who used it to satirise his contemporaries. Ironically likening bathos to the depths of profundity, Pope lauded his peers for their influential writings whilst openly deriding their absurd misuses of figure and rhetorical device. Pope's method proved prophetic: today, artists regularly celebrate and incorporate bathetic practice.

This essay collection considers how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music. The innovative and diverse contributions assess the consequences of this endemic inversion of aesthetic standards, and consider where artistic production might go after hitting, and so comfortably inhabiting, rock bottom.

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